Responsive Web Design: Definition, How It Work and Tips

Category
Website
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6 mins
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916
Posting
13 Sep 2023

Nowadays, everything is digital, a website has become a necessity to find various information, services, or sell something on the internet. Maybe some of you are happy to create a website or hire a developer to fulfill this for others. There are so many components on the website, one of which is responsive web design.

This component is very important in order to make the website accessible on any device, considering that users not only access the website on a laptop or computer but on mobile devices as well.

As a website owner, you have to think about how to make your website friendly for mobile devices. That doesn't mean it can't be accessed. Responsive web design makes the website user-friendly, and if this is not given special attention, the website will become uncomfortable to browse because the design is not well laid out for mobile devices. This is very dangerous if the purpose of the website is to sell online.

In the world of user interface, there are two components that must be considered: in addition to optimizing the design on computer devices, it must also be optimized for mobile devices. Here we will explain the meaning of responsive web design, what responsive web design looks like, how it works, and what benefits users and website owners get.

 

What is Responsive Web Design

 

 

1. What is responsive web design?

Responsive web design is a situation where the website has a clean user interface with certain methods to produce a synchronous screen for mobile devices, tablets, and TVs with different resolutions. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a web design technique that allows flexibility and optimization without compromising any other element.

This method optimizes CSS to define elements that can be adaptive when the user switches from a laptop to a smartphone and vice versa. Responsive web design is necessary because it adapts the appearance of web pages according to the device the user is using and continues to grow due to the fast technology of smartphones and tablets with different screen resolutions. This method can be used to solve this problem without removing the site elements.

Some of the elements we often find on websites are text, video, and images. It is critical if this image is not optimized, as it affects the performance of the website and makes it difficult to adjust the resolution on different screens. Image resolution is one of the challenges for UI developers to adapt to different device screens. In fact, the images have different resolutions and qualities.

If the image is too big, the website will slow down, and if it is too small, it will crash. The same applies to videos, such as if you embed a YouTube video on your website. If the size of the video is not taken into account when displaying it on the website, this will make the website awkward to navigate. Imagine if there weren't many videos.

With this approach, all these problems can be overcome by using additional CSS syntax to change it to suit any device. Responsive web design can adjust the resolution of images or videos on different screens. Making images and videos flow smoothly when users visit the site also improves the user interface of the site.

 

2. Understand how responsive web design works and how it works.

According to Tutsplus, for responsive web design to work, there are basic principles that must be followed to work properly, which are media queries, elastic grid, responsive media and the viewport-meta tag can be used when it cannot on the device, select view location without enabling media queries.

1. Fluid Grid

The fluid grid is a boundary that defines the position of components in a layout and can change depending on the image. Fluid grids will resize to any width because they follow relative size units such as percentage units or em units rather than fixed units such as pixels.

2. Media Query

Media queries allow you to be more specific with a responsive layout and can be scaled to a specific size. Media queries collect data to help layouts determine screen sizes on different devices with appropriate CSS styles.

Example:

@media(min-width:992px) {
   .image {
      width: 970px;
   }
}

@media(max-width:768px) {
   .image {
      width: 750px;
   }
}

 

3. Responsive media

The last basic principle is responsive media. Responsive media is very important on modern websites that use a lot of images, videos, or other media. Note that these types of content have different response sizes.

When images support CSS image sizing, it doesn't work in responsive layouts because the unit size is fixed. Themes used in responsive media design can display the maximum number of media file types, such as images or videos. This property ensures that the dimensions do not exceed the width limit, which fits the screen size. The value of the max-width attribute must be set to max-width: 100%.

4. Viewport

The viewport is required when the device cannot determine the initial rendering of a website without running a media query. Meta Tag Viewport was first used by Apple to solve this problem with their iPhones. Window area height and width values are usually set to "1". This improves issues where aspect ratios of unit sizes cannot be recognized.

 

What is Responsive Web Design

 

3. What are the benefits of using responsive web design?

Some of the benefits that are felt after the website has been optimized with this method include:

1. Accessible from any device

Please note that in the era of rapid technological development, various smartphone devices currently have different screen sizes, so your website that has been optimized for responsive web design will be flexible when used on any device, whether it's a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

Given that the main purpose of this method is to make the user more comfortable. And it is also useful for increasing traffic and conversion rates on the website.

2. Fast page loading

Almost 70% of the traffic on the internet is accessed via smartphones, if the website accessed via smartphone is very slow to open, it will most likely be abandoned by visitors, or the bounce rate will be high. Responsive web design can be a solution to these problems, apart from other factors that affect website performance, and can overcome the bounce rate on the site.

3. Save cost

Optimizing a website with responsive web design will be much faster than making your own mobile application from scratch. Of course, this requires a lot of money. This method provides a solution for site owners to be accessed via a smartphone or tablet without having to have a mobile application and incur a fee for it. That's because this method only requires a few extra lines of CSS code to be quickly accessible on any device.

 

Conclusion

With responsive web design technology, you will get extraordinary benefits considering that many users are surfing the internet using smartphones or tablets. By optimizing responsive web design on the website, it will be much easier to generate conversion rates or traffic and avoid bounce rates.

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